Autism FAQ - History

It has been presumed that before the discovery of the pattern of
symptoms now known as autism, that people did exist with the syndrome,
and were lumped together either with the mentally retarded or the
insane.
We might expect to have inherited
sufficiently-detailed descriptions of such people
that we would be able to see a pattern suggesting autism among them,
but there have not been many descriptions that suggest autism.
One such description is of a boy found in the 19th century and
named Victor.
At the time, some assumed he had grown up without human contact
in the forest. The story was recorded in the book
The Wild Boy of Aveyron.

Discovery

Leo Kanner published his first paper identifying autistic children in 1943,
asserting he had noticed such children since 1938
(see reference to Kanner, "Autistic Disturbance of Affective Contact",
see Selected Articles section below).
Before Kanner noticed and recorded a pattern of symptoms, such children
would be classified as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded.
Kanner observed that these children often demonstrated capabilities
that showed that they were not merely slow learners, yet they didn't
fit the patterns of emotionally disturbed children. Thus he
invented a new category, which he called Early Infantile Autism,
which has since sometimes been called Kanner's Syndrome.
Hans Asperger
(see section Well Known Researchers and
Practicioners
and reference to Asperger, "Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood"
in Selected Articles section below)
essentially made the same discoveries at the same
time, independently of Kanner, but the patients he identified all
had speech, so the term Asperger's Syndrome or Asperger Syndrome
is often used to label autistic people who have speech.

The word "autism"

Note that before before Kanner incorporated it into his label,
the word "autism" already had a meaning: "escape from reality"
(coined, I think, by Eugen Bleuler in 1912, who had already coined the
term "schizophrenia").
Kanner borrowed Bleuler's term either because Kanner indeed believed
the children were trying to escape from reality,
or he felt that whatever was going on, the children gave that impression.
Today, one hears the word autism in the context of Kanner's syndrome much
more often than one hears it used with Bleuler's original meaning,
and someone who regularly deals with Kanner's syndrome might misunderstand
when the word is used in its original sense.
For example, if a psychologist says "I sense some autism in this patient,"
s/he could be using established terminology to say the particular
patient is escaping from reality, yet s/he would not necessarily
be talking about someone who suffers from the developmental disorder
that this FAQ is about.

Older Theories/Origin

After Kanner and Asperger's discovery,
parents were observed to treat their autistic
children without the warmth and affection which is normally observed
between parent and child. Freudian psychology had a ready-made
theory waiting for this syndrome and this observation:
that if certain basic psychological bonds
between parent and child fail to form that the child will fail to
progress. A Freudian theory of autism remained in vogue in the 50s
and early 60s. Though the theory fit Freudian psychology
hand-in-glove, there are two obvious alternative possible
explanations that the Freudian theory dismisses: one is that the
parents' observed stilted interaction with the child was the result
of the child's Autistic behavior; the other is that Autism is an
extreme instance of a genetically-inherited personality trait that
was present to a milder extent in such observed parents.

Older Treatments

Based upon psychological theories of the basis of
autism, some children were removed to their parents' home and put in
foster care to see if they would recover. When this proved
insufficient to cure them, some attempts were made to bring children
through psychological states which they missed out on by virtue of
being in a dysfunctional family. Some success has been reported (as
has been reported for every treatment ever put forward) but no
clear-cut success that would lead to universal, long-term adoption
of the methods.

Changes in meaning of the word autism after Kanner

Above and beyond the distinction
between the concept that Bleuler coined the word "autism" to label
and the syndrome that is the subject of this
document, the syndrome has been broadened somewhat since Kanner
first published his paper. Kanner reported a rate of occurrence of
1 in 10000 whereas the ASA states the rate as 15 in 10000. Kanner
first identified people who were clearly not mentally retarded
(since this was the unexplained group of people at the time). Since
then, it has been observed that some mentally retarded people have
autistic symptoms whereas others don't; so it is thought that the
conditions overlap. This explains some of the difference in the
reported rates of occurrence, though some now claim that it
doesn't fully explain it.

Other terms that have been applied to what we now call "autism".
Childhood schizophrenia, infantile autism, Aspergers Syndrome,
Kanner's Syndrome. Probably lots of autistic people used to be
termed retarded, or schizophrenic, though obviously those terms (as
then used) were not as specific as our current "autism" label.

Politics

The parents of autistic children are naturally less-than-objective
about their own roles in the cause of their childrens'
conditions. In the 60s, this was fueled by a widespread belief that
the condition was caused by the way the parents treated their
children.
When evidence to the contrary
(see section Theories)
was uncovered yet not widely known,
parents had to act as their own advocates.
Parents still sometimes find themselves in the position of trying to
explain how the fault does not lie with themselves since
the general public's information on autism is still sometimes
dated or wrong.

Controversies

There remain a lot of controversies about treatment
and probably have been from almost the first. See section above,
"Controversies".

Past Articles/Books

This article and book, written by a prime advocate of the Freudian
theory of the cause of autism were highly influential in attitudes
about Autism for a long time.

Bruno Bettelheim.

"Joey: A 'mechanical boy.'" Scientific American, 200, 116-127.

Bruno Bettelheim.

The Empty Fortress: Infantile autism and the birth of the self
(Collier-MacMillan, 1967).